I love making up wacky characters of various kinds. It's one of my favorite things about writing. Usually though a good character is something that springs to my mind by accident. Most of my characters, when I first write them, are incredibly flat and it may take months or years to flesh them out into a person I'd want to write dialogue for.
This holds especially true for my character Beth, who is meant to be the protagonist of the story Animalburg. I decided that in-story she was 12 years old (my Animalburg characters have human-esque life-spans) so I assumed that she would start the story a little flat, and gain characterization as I wrote. But I could never put pen to paper. The character bored me, and one can't write with a boring character.
The other day I got off task and created a truly out-there character named Cylee. She's an 7 1/2 ft tall space alien with bright green fur. She was born during a pivotal battle of a revolutionary uprising on her home planet. She grew up in a world of cultural turmoil. As an adult she took a job as a grunt on a space cargo-ship. She's traveled all over the galaxy, picking up snatches of other languages, fashion ideas from other cultures, and married a space-age gunsmith. Her best friend is an alien that looks like a porcupine dragon. She has an attitude, shows affection shoving people around (getting various results depending on the size of the recipient), and she knows how to curse in 10 different languages (though she's only conversationally fluent in Kenlilia and Trade-standard). Needless to say, she's very fun to write, especially when paired against my character Owl who is much smaller than her. She tends to treat him like a child, much to his annoyance.
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| Cylee yanking Owl into a stairwell, and out of danger. |
Now I have to figure out how she went from wearing pink and dragging around a blanket to wearing cargo shorts and aspiring to be a ninja. This will indeed be fun.
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